


in stature, grace, and hue

by scioscribe



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Pining, Surveillance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-26 16:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17748995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: The first time Heimdall notices her, she is beheading the ruler of a backwater world.  It’s outside Asgard’s purview and death, as a rule, is too common to attract his attention; this does, however.  She does.





	in stature, grace, and hue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



> Title from Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain."

The first time Heimdall notices her, she is beheading the ruler of a backwater world.  It’s outside Asgard’s purview and death, as a rule, is too common to attract his attention; this does, however.  She does.  It isn’t her method, though he’s not above admiring, well, the execution of the execution—the decisive swing and the way her arm is so strong and her sword is so sharp that the movement is fluid, almost uninterrupted, even to his discerning eye.  If you watch things long enough, you develop a frankly disconcerting sense of aesthetics.  But it isn’t that, or, at least, is not only that.

It may be her eyes.  Her face as she kills is immobile and unflinching—she has done this before, that expressionless cast says, she has taught herself to show nothing—but her eyes burn with life.  Her violence is a mask fastened over her soul.

Both assassin and slave, then.  He could take her cause to the All-Father and ask that they send a party to liberate her—but there is a risk there.  Hela rebelled, the Valkyries fell or scattered, and Odin grew wary of women warriors.  He might see this one as trouble, better eliminated than loosed.

It’s not an unreasonable view.  He couldn’t argue with it.

Best, then, not to have the conversation at all.  He wishes her well.  That is unfair to those who die beneath her coolly-deployed efficiency, but, right or wrong, he can live with that contradiction; he has lived with far worse.

*

Some of the light has gone from her eyes when he sees her next.  Or so he judges—it is only a glimpse.

She walks beside a tall man—a Titan, Heimdall thinks—and moves like she’s an extension of him, his right hand reaching effortlessly out.  But it’s partly an illusion, a way to keep the man from touching her.  If she moves in the direction he moves, to the extent that he moves, he never reaches her.  She preserves the space between them like it’s a crack to let air in.

The Titan is a concern.  Heimdall has cause to watch him, but his gaze cannot fix upon him for too long.  The man has an irritating habit of ducking into the Void, where even Heimdall’s attention can’t follow him.  The Void is a lidless eye that repels any outside looking, as if only it has the right to stare.

It’s discourteous.  No voyeur likes a curtain, let alone one that doubles as his competition.

Against his better judgment, he speaks to Loki about it.  The maddened prince in his dungeon—though it might be greater madness to look for truth from a man who delights in lies.

At least Loki is almost singularly inept at parsing someone else’s deceit.  There’s an innocence to him that way.  He thinks he is surrounded by blockheads and stodgy paragons of virtue, which destines him, Heimdall supposes, for a lifetime of surprises both good and bad.

“You spent time with the Mad Titan,” Heimdall says.

“Yes.  And you didn’t send a valiant rescue party.  I was very disappointed.”

It seems worth being gentle about that, if nothing else.  “I couldn’t see you, you know.  I can’t look inside the Void.”

Loki smiles.  “I’m sure.”  He’s still keeping his thumb in his book, showily waiting for Heimdall to leave.  _I am being interrupted and put-upon_ , the gesture says.

“What do you know of the Titan’s army?”

A fraction of stillness as Loki processes this.  “The Black Order?”

“If that’s what they’re called.”

“You don’t know?”

“I can look where I like,” Heimdall says.  “I can’t always hear.  And my lip-reading is unreliable.”

“Well, that’s strangely charming.  Yes, they’re called the Black Order.  _He_ calls them his children.  I did not qualify for that dubious honor—I don’t generally, do I?—but several others did.”  He surrenders his place in his book, slowly coming alive.  He can be helpful when it suits him, when his interest is roused.  And he has had a drought of listeners, so Heimdall receives the flood.

He learns her name: Gamora.

*

In his exile—fugitive flight, holiday, however it amuses him to think of it—he has time and leisure enough to check in on her occasionally.

_So you became a hero, then.  I should have guessed you might._

He doesn’t let himself look too often.  Loneliness is no guarantee of pardon, and he can hardly claim, at this point, that he’s monitoring her for the sake of Asgard’s security.  She’s no threat to them.

Instead, after Asgard’s fall, she proves part of their salvation.

Their very noisy salvation.

“Okay, assholes, we’re your escorts!  The gun-toting, ride-along kind, not the kind you pay for hanky-panky, unless somebody here wants to make a couple extra credits.  Quill?  No?  Okay.  So we’re gonna lead your little raggedy-ass caravan—”

“Rocket.  Their entire planet was destroyed.”

The rabbit wraps up a little more gracefully.  “And we’re gonna serve soothing drinks and crap like that.  Mostly alcohol.”

“I like that one already,” Thor murmurs.

“Yeah,” the Valkyrie says.  “He’s my new best friend.”

“I thought I was your new best friend.”

“Kings can’t be anyone’s friend,” the Valkyrie says.  Heimdall can’t tell whether or not she means this, nor can Thor, nor, he suspects, can she.  She saunters off to get better acquainted with the rabbit.

“I have friends,” Thor says.  “Loki, you and I are friends.”

“Not quite,” Loki says, with an unusual frost to his voice.

Thor deciphers him in ways Heimdall cannot and lays a hand on his arm.  “True.  We’re brothers.  That’s something else.”

One corner of Loki’s mouth twitches upwards at that, very reluctantly.  He nods at the Guardians of the Galaxy.  “I believe I know her.  The Zehoberei woman.”

“Gamora,” Heimdall says without meaning to.

“Heimdall is a friend,” Thor says.

“Yes,” Heimdall agrees.  He would agree with the Valkyrie that Thor’s kingship complicates that, but he will not believe that it overrules or negates it, not entirely, and especially not when Thor is in desperate need of friendship.  The Warriors Three are gone, and Sif is as yet unaccounted for.  He intends to offer whatever he can.

And Thor is an easy person to offer it to, because even now, despite everything on his heart, he smiles—more genuinely now, not only as part of his ruse of wounded good-cheer.

“As _your_ friend, Heimdall, should I ask my brother to introduce you to this Gamora?  Or do you know her already?”

“What?” Loki says, looking back and forth between them.  “You can’t be serious.  You don’t… have liaisons.”

“Perhaps he would like to,” Thor says pointedly.

As so often with the two of them, Heimdall feels some precise control of the situation has escaped him.

“I would appreciate an introduction, yes.”

Loki is still disbelieving, but he is trying, at least for now, so he cuts off whatever lengthy discursion he’s tempted to embark upon and crosses the room with Heimdall.  He inclines his head to the Guardians, briefly and formally.

“Are we nodding?” the big man says.

“He’s bowing,” Gamora says crisply.  “More or less.  It’s as close as he’ll come to it.  He’s a prince—or he used to say so, anyway.”  She folds her arms—a protective gesture, but more sympathetically keyed than laying a hand on a weapon.  “Why are you here, Loki?  I thought you hated Asgard.”

The Terran says, “You know this guy?”

“He was one of Thanos’s pawns.”

“Whoa, buddy, if you’re still working for Thanos—”

“For only a little while,” Gamora says, backing him down.  “I doubt there’s any love lost between them.”  She raises her eyebrows.  “Is there?”

“None at all.”

“Then answer my question.”

Loki dodges most of it—of course he does—but answers the heart of it all the same, and surprisingly simply, “I came home.”

Gamora studies him a moment.  “All right.  I’m sorry about your home, then.”

“Thank you.”  He clears his throat.  “Gamora, I would like to present to you Heimdall, Guardian of the Bifrost and Gatekeeper of Asgard, who would like to make your acquaintance… apparently.”  Considering himself absolved of that responsibility, he turns to the Terran.  “The rabbit-creature mentioned drinks?”

“You okay here, Gamora?” the Terran says.

“Fine, Peter.  Go ahead.  Just keep Groot away from any drinks.”

“You couldn’t really protect Gamora anyway,” the big man says.  “She is considerably stronger and more capable than you are.”

“Cool.  Thanks, buddy.  Really a balm for my self-esteem there.  Come on, come with me and Prince Humperdinck over here and let’s get shitfaced.”

This leaves Heimdall and Gamora alone.

On her own, up close, she is as coolly beautiful as ever, but his perception of her has a density that surpasses that; now she’s more than a vision.  It’s not only that he can—or so he imagines—catch the faintest trace of acrid sweat, of foreign leather—it’s that he’s become an object in her world, that he’s seen in return.  Examined, even.  He has almost forgotten the sensation of that—what it is like to have a stranger beginning to know him.

“Loki mentioned you,” Gamora says.  “When I knew him before.”  She hasn’t unfolded her arms.  “He said you could see everywhere in the universe.”

“Almost everywhere.”

Her hold on herself tightens.  “And you wanted to meet _me_.”  The emphasis is slight, but he catches it all the same.  “So you saw me.”

“From time to time.”

“I’m not any of your business.  Or if I am, you had a funny way of showing it, letting me loose on the galaxy—letting _Thanos_ loose.”

He’s seen her fight.  She uses swords and has no shield; she can only block blows with an attack.  So she’ll judge him for his stillness before she lets him judge her for what she’s done—but he has no desire to do that.  She doesn’t know all the terror he’s seen unleashed in his long lifetime.  She doesn’t know that to him her crimes are less remarkable than her renunciation of them.

He doesn’t have a real way to tell her that.  He hasn’t, in the grand scale of history, been much of a conversationalist—more of a listener.  But they’re making something new here.  They’re all of them getting their hands dirty and reinventing the world they were born into and it is the least he could do, he thinks, to be honest to a woman he admires.

So he says, “No, you weren’t supposed to be my concern—I just had trouble looking away from your eyes.”

She scoffs.  Her fingernails stay dark, pressed hard against her arms.  “My eyes.”

“You kept some part of yourself away from all you were asked to do—when I first saw you.  Then I thought you were drowning in that life.  And now you look as if you’re who you were meant to be.  And happy.”  He considers her.  “Not so much right now.”

“Since I’m listening to someone I’ve never met before tell me my life story.”  She lets her hands loosen and then they fall to her sides, a small tremor in her fingertips.  What nervousness is there doesn’t show in her voice, which is as shell-hard as ever.  “But I’ll make it through.”

*

The Guardians of the Galaxy are most often out ahead of Asgard’s floating world, bludgeoning and cutting a path through any difficult territory; Xandar, an untested ally gained back in Odin’s earliest days of peace, proved truer than they deserved and gave the Guardians a line of credit to use on Thor’s behalf.  They negotiate their way out of trouble when they can, bribe their way when they can’t, and fight when they have no other resources remaining.  Those aboard who are battle-ready join the Guardians in those little skirmishes when they can.

It cannot escape Heimdall’s notice that Gamora often winds up fighting at his side.  She doesn’t come to visit him and she never comes to their ship on her own, but when there’s trouble, she puts him in her orbit.

She sees him looking at her on one of these occasions.  She wipes sweat off her forehead—a distant second to cleaning the blood off her sword, which was done in a more timely fashion.  “I used to stalk people for days before I would know exactly when to make my move.  Observe them until I knew their lives inside-out.  The longer I stayed, the longer I drew out an assassination, the longer I had before I had to go back home.  But I had my pride, so I didn’t really drag it out much.  I wanted to be the best.  That’s how I survived.”  She sighs, exhaling through her teeth.  “And now I’ve been talking to Peter too much, I’m getting drawn into these tangents.  I should get to watch you back is my point.  I could have just as easily been watching you and then I’d know things to say to make you think I knew you.  I could have all these ideas like I understood.”

“I don’t pretend to understand.”

“You give off the impression of thinking you do.”

“Then that’s your observation,” Heimdall says.  “That’s what you think you understand about _me_.”

“You’re infuriating.”  She nods at the Bifrost sword.  “And that’s too big to fight with conveniently.  It slows you down and makes you look awkward.  And Drax says it make him think of a penis.”

Heimdall looks at the sword carefully.  “Then your Drax understands anatomy differently than I do.”

There is a small, indecipherable noise: it could be a laugh or a cough or a scoff.  Or even someone distant from them scuffing the sole of their boot against the floor.

“That’s good to know,” Gamora says, her voice even, and then she walks away.

He watches her go, which is more or less his job description, which is more or less painful.

*

The night before they reach Earth, Gamora takes a pod and comes to the Asgardians on her own.

Heimdall’s vision, his attention, is a choice.  He has to look, and that comes with decisions about where and how far and at whom.  His gift doesn’t preclude someone surprising him.  And she does.  He’s already in bed, half-asleep; he doesn’t expect her until she breaks into his room, until she settles the slightly serrated edge of one of her blades against his throat.  He can feel the lightness and steadiness of her hand holding it there.  She won’t cut him unless she means to, and she doesn’t mean to.

“I like more lather with a shave,” he says.  “Usually.”

“I didn’t think I could sneak up on you.  Did you let me?”

“I have some character flaws, but arrogance enough to humor you isn’t one of them.”

She slides her knife back into its sheath.  “I told you I knew how to watch until I understood.”  Then something in her face cracks—humor comes into it like light, brightening her, brightening the room.  “Even if all I picked up on after a while is that you generally go to sleep.”

“Generally.”

She turns the lamp on without warning him.  He sits up, rubbing his eyes but not his throat; he knows without checking that there’s no drop of blood there, probably not so much as a mark.

“Are you staying on Earth?”

“If that’s what Thor wants.”

She sits down on the edge of his bed, in the space made by him drawing his legs up, and turns her head to look at him.  Her eyes are unreadable to him, walls rather than windows.  “Does Thor control where you go and what you do?”

“He’s my king.”

“That’s just a word.”

“He isn’t like what you’re thinking,” Heimdall says.  “Truly.  My fealty’s a choice, no different from yours now.  Or different just in how it’s shaped.”  He is explaining it badly.  He’s not a philosopher—he can’t say concisely what makes a good king different from a bad one and what, if anything, makes a bad king different from a despot different from a monster, or at least he can’t explain it having been woken up in the middle of the night.  He hopes that this isn’t what she’s come for.

She seems to accept his belief in Thor, if nothing else, because she nods.  “Peter has family here.  He’s thinking about seeing them again, maybe.  We might stay for a while.  Or come back again.”  She shifts her weight, tilting more towards him now.

He decides at last what’s in her expression—curiosity, wariness.  They are lopsided still and maybe always will be—unless on her time on Earth she follows him through the rain, she looks through the curtains of New Asgard, she stalks him to ground.  He is more spy than killer, and she began as information; she has a killer’s instincts still, and may make some strange quarry of him.  He could wake again with her blade at his throat.  He could see again that laughter in her eyes.  But all of that is in the future—conjecture, since his sight has never stretched so far.  He is hoping, hoping that she will come find him.

If nothing else, she has found him tonight.

She leans closer and kisses him.  She’s never asked him not to watch her, and he doesn’t know whether that is promising or terrible or nothing at all.  He closes his eyes and thinks of the taste of her instead, apple-sweet and quinine-bitter.


End file.
